Simon

My wife and I came across these two fellas during a trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. It was a tad tricky to get pictures of them with a 50mm lens (well, 75mm if you take the crop sensor on my D200 into account) but thankfully they obliged our curiosity by creeping close enough for a photograph or two.

We got a new bike for our department at work, so Ryan decided to take it out for a spin.  I figured it would be a good opportunity to try a few panning shots, and of the roughly 20 that we took I was only happy with this one (though another one was decent, but just a tad too blurry for my taste).  Ryan was kind enough to oblige my curiosity and bike in circles around the student union plaza while I fiddled with my camera.  This was on a clear day at roughly 3pm, so a neutral density filter would have been really handy but thankfully f/16 (as slow as my 50mm lens goes) was able to handle the job decently well.

I’m not sure exactly what type of tree this is, but it’s outside my building at work and the Arbor Day website tells me it’s a Dogwood.  I took this picture about 9am when the sun was still relatively low on the horizon, creating more interesting shadows than at high noon.  I liked the clear blue sky in the background too, which is harder to capture later in the day unless you’ve got an ND filter handy.  Also, I didn’t do a single edit to this picture–not even a simple crop. Generally I like to touch up my photos (my tool of choice right now is Aperture) and it’s not that this photo is perfect by any means, but I was just pleased with how it turned out to begin with so I didn’t see the need to process it afterwards.

 

I like the stark colors on this fire plug, and the blue accents really stood out to me as I was walking past.

I took this photo for a contest at Oklahoma State University, with the theme of “Capturing Student Life.” Not sure if it will win or not, but even if it doesn’t I am fairly please with the results. This dude was kind enough to let me take his picture while doing a kickflip on his board, but was quick to apologize for what was apparently the poor execution of his maneuver. I thanked him and assured him that it was far, far better than anything I could hope to do on a skateboard.

When I went to submit the photo for the contest, I was told that doing tricks on campus is illegal. Thankfully nobody told this dude :)